Chronicles and Characters :: :: University of Virginia Library

A thorn-tree with a desperate arm
Flung out fierce in wild alarm
Of something which, it madly feels,
The night to plague it yet conceals.
No help it gets tho'! An owl dash'd out
Of the darkness, steering his ghostliness thither,
Pry'd in at the boughs, and pass'd on with a shout
From who-knows-whence to who-knows-whither:
The unquiet Spirit abroad on the air
Moved with a moan that way, and spent
A moment or more in the effort to vent
On the tortured tree which he came to scare
The sullen fit of his discontent;
But, laughing low as he grew aware
Of the long-already-imposed despair
Of the terrified thing he had paused to torment,
He pass'd, pursuing his purpose elsewhere,
And follow'd the whim of his wicked bent:
A rheumy glow-worm, come to peer
Into the hollow trunk, crawl'd near,
And glimmer'd awhile, but intense fear,
Or tame connivance with something wrong
Which the night was intending, quench'd ere long
His lantern. Therefore the tree remains,
For all its gestures void and vain,
Which still at their utmost fail to explain
Any natural cause for the terror that strains
Each desperate limb to be freed and away,

In sheer paralysis of dismay
Struck stark,—and so, night's abject, stands.